Hymnal Hamtastic XIV has rearranged my taste on armor. I can’t go back to WoW’s ugly pixelated blocks.
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If I’m going to be honest, I do feel the raid armor sets are progressively getting less impressive over time. Every expansion has great sets, do not misunderstand me, but I do feel like every expansion there’s less design effort that goes into the sets.
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The armor sets do tend to follow the same broad beats. Slap spikes and a mask on some pajamas and call it a day.
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I’d personally be down for forgoing the overly exaggerated, and frankly dumb, designs that WoW sets have in favor of more sets that look like normal clothes and armor. Like whatever that set they released was if you requested a friend to join and they stayed subbed for like 6 months. That was a cool set where they clearly put effort into it with the 3D assets. I want more armors like that.
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I pick my mogs to look more like simple adventuring gear or clothes so my characters don’t look like they are on a bad acid trip. I’m liking some “generic” armours they’ve been showing coming out even if they are lazy reskins.
In other news: hope no one plans on playing tuesday, “maintenance” til 6pm est… with probable extensions.
Generic armors are fine, but since coming back I now am seeing the Dark Ranger attire available to Hunters and it’s just incredibly, incredibly bland in terms of design. Hell, looking at the Shadowlands Raiding attire, outside Castle Nathria none of them are super spectacular. The Domination raid stuff is nice, but universally Lich King Spikes™. The Castlevania Raid at least has a bit of class Personality.
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Let’s take a trip in time back to Draenor.
The Dark Ranger attire is a recolored Rogue set from WoD, classified as “mail”:
Of all the flavors available, I’m choosing salty. Dark Rangers have been a player obsession for years and what do they give players? A small questline and a recolored set.
S a l t y.
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If they’re just going to recolor existing armor, why the hell wouldn’t you use arguably the best Hunter set out of the Nighthold?
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I think the Antorus tier is among the best collection of armor appearances in the game, so idk if I’d say they’re getting less impressive (unless you’re just saying “since legion”, I guess Legion was a long time ago now…)
BfA was weird because it had some really cool armor sets, just not from raids. Which is good for me, because I don’t like raiding. Heritage armors were mostly great, and so were warfront sets.
And the things all the “good” sets have in common–Antorus, Heritage Armors, Warfronts–is they focused on what our characters are rather than what we’re fighting. They were all about your race in heritage armors, or your faction in the Warfront sets, or your class in Antorus. That’s the main thing I want to see more of. Most raid sets are not too interesting because they’re just like “hey champion, wanna look like that eldritch tentacle abomination you just fought??” to which the answer is usually “no!!”
And the dark ranger set seems like a good thing to me–yeah its a low effort recolor and NPC skin, but doing relatively low effort things that are good ideas is good! It is a good idea to let players use the NPC skins that already exist!
There are lots more NPC options that’d be great to add for players, and if the devs do it I wouldn’t go “nyeh it should have been a detailed original model”, it’d just be a good idea on its own to throw that sort of thing in as a reward.
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Ysera, though I can’t remember when the change came. I could listen to the old Ysera read stats on white items until she put me to sleep which was pretty appropriate really
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Players: Want Dark Rangers. Want it to be its own entity/identity. Want to play a Dark Ranger class with Dark Ranger spells/utilities, etc etc. Spend years expressing to Blizz how much they want this.
Blizz: We hear you! We’re listening to what you want, so we’re giving you a recolored nine-year old rogue set that we’ve tagged as “mail” a short questline, red eye color and a skin option. It’s the same thing. You think you want to play Dark Rangers, but you don’t.
As usual, appreciate the positivity on these forums because it balances out the negativity of people like me, but hard disagree.
This was a lazy, low-effort crumb.
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As I said before, Blizz has been playing corrupt-a-wish since they started “listening” to the players.
Fixed it for you. 
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This isn’t me trying to dogpile, but I will say it is interesting how long WoW was the king of the MMO mountain led to taking the player base for granted so much that even now, with WoW still upon its throne but in a lot more dubious a position (I just finished watching Monty Zander’s 6 hour Bioshock series retrospective, so I compare the MMO market to Rapture and WoW being Andrew Ryan in 1960), the Devs are still doing half-measures.
I’m not sure if that just showcases how truncated the WoW team has become that they can’t spare resources from Dragonflight for anything more substantial, or if - like Ryan - it comes from a continued place of arrogance that it’s “good enough” and people will continue to drink from the well.
Which might not entirely be misplaced, considering my own return for at least a month.
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Some quick Google-fu says: “Ysera was voiced Lenore Andriel in Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm, and is voiced by Tara Platt in Legion.” And I assume onwards.
As to why the change, still not sure. Could be any number of reasons.
Adding an NPC skin and a recolored mog set doesn’t really mean a class is never gonna happen. But classes are something that only get added every 5+ years, and the next expansion is going for dragon lads rather than mini-Sylvanases. If I wanted to be a Dark Ranger I’d rather have a dead skin for my elf now than wait half a decade or more.
I wouldn’t expect a class in an end-of-expansion .5 patch–I wouldn’t even expect new player customization options, so I think it is fine that they added some. Could they have done more? Sure, but they can always do more, and I don’t wanna cricitize them for doing something that is fundamentally a good idea: adding unique character customization rewards.
It is impossible to dogpile a corporation.
I think Blizzard did get a little too proud of itself. In fairness, there was a really good stretch of time there where they were doing amazing. WoW had blown up the MMO market by making it casual-friendly and Overwatch looked like it would do the same. Starcraft was still a topic of interest and so was Diablo.
Interestingly, I think Overwatch might have been what signaled the spiraling decline.
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Overwatch might have begun the spiral, but StarCraft 2 being broken up into three games with a plot that just went all over the place really was the warning sign.
It’s weird to me how StarCraft went from the premiere e-sport to never spoken about anywhere. It just collectively vanished from the general consciousness.
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dark rangers being a hunter reskin is probably for the best because theyve been overlayed on hunters for years in game- they went from half-banshee half-ranger hero units to just using special arrows and even taking on hunter pets with some wandering around with undead animals
the half measure thing is right, though. i think the forsaken are wayyyyyy overly-coddled by the dev team and dark rangers only getting the bofa set but not the actual bow npcs use is riotously funny. even when they appeal to their preferred players they can only ever be half assed.
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maybe im just rude but i don’t think they’d make another elf-only class that is just hunter the second iteration.
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Honestly should just come out with class skins which changes the cosmetics for abilities to fit a specific theme but no real functional change to the class. A lot of potential with it and adds variety.
Death Knights and Warlocks could get a necromancer skin. Hunters get Dark Ranger. Monks a Mike Tyson face tattoo. Holy form for shadow priest and shadow healing for holy priests etc.
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